Folks,
This is something I wrote way back in Sept. 1997 during a debate generated on an African-American created forum about the genealogy or descent of black people, the complexion of Jesus, some blacks (African-Americans and the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia) claiming to be Jews/Israelites, or whatever. In view of the current deteriorating situation on the God front, I have decided to raise these issues again, as I promised then to tackle some of the questions and issues raised herein in the future. It has taken more years than I even anticipated. We have since the 1990s been swamped with all kinds of religious and intellectual charlatans who have made these claims their articles of faith with which they are hoodwinking the ignorant masses, both lettered and unlettered. This is what I wrote then and still just as valid as when I wrote it.
Even though I could have written something else, I just posed some questions here, pointed a finger here and there to mark some paths for clearing up later. This may therefore appear as another muddle to some people, especially those I believe are victims of crooked thinking.
As you all know by now, according to Christian mythology, God destroyed all living creatures on earth with the exception of those saved by Noah and his family on the Ark.
Of course, the fishes and creatures living in water could be said to be exceptions too, since the flood waters could not be said to have drown them! It did not stop some creationists from claiming that they were also drowned too. The earth, the story goes on, was then re-populated by the humans and the flora and fauna from the Ark. It therefore follows that we Africans are also descendants of the sons and the wives of the three children of Noah - Shem, Ham and Japheth - assuming intermarriages between the off-springs of the children of these three brothers, instead of sister/brother conjugal relations and incest proper, both not uncommon in those days.
For a long time, Christians had held that we black Africans (not only the ancient Egyptians, Berbers and others identified as Hamites) are descendants of Canaan, the 4th and youngest son of Ham. Canaan was reportedly cursed by Noah, when he awoke from his drunken stupor, got to know that Ham had come to see him lying naked and told his brothers, who went backwards into his tent and covered his nakedness. This curse put on Canaan [and his descendants] for some unexplainable reason, because he was not the one who saw Noah naked, was that he would become a slave to his brothers, serving them, drawer of water and hewer of rocks, as recorded in the Bible. Poor Canaan! That was before the rule about sons not bearing the sins of their fathers was invented, I suppose. Then, this "trokosi" logic could be said to make sense! (Trokosi - vestal virginship - is a system of enslavement of innocent girls by some fetish houses for offences caused by relations, found up to today at parts of Ghana, Togo and Benin Republic).
Hmmm! Anyway, things might have been mightily bad in those riotous days before the deluge, with a dangerous and cursing, drunken-bolt (an alcoholic) like Noah being the only person to find favour with the Good Lord. Not quite a pleasing role model for our children in these trying times of alcoholism and use of drugs. It is bad enough to curse people even if curses don't work. That shall be the high moral value to be adhered to by all, if you are in my Moral Brigade. It can be broken at your own peril, of course.:-)
Now, having digressed a bit, the fact that Cush, the eldest son of Ham, was the one who allegedly settled in the area of upper Egypt and spreading to east and north Africa and, should be regarded as the father of the Hamites in Africa was smugly ignored in the bid to find a religious justification and moralization for the enslavement of black or negroid Africans, who, by the way, are not Hamitic. Yet, even the Dutch Reformed Church used same claims to justify Apartheid, long after the Abolitionists had debunked these claims.
Perhaps, it can be argued that black Africans are not Cushite. Granted! But they are not descendants of Canaan either, by biblical accounts. Ancient Canaanites were Semitic (not negroid) and their home region is exactly the land of Canaan allegedly promised to the Israelites by their vengeance seeking god, Yahweh. We all know where that region is, don't we? It is today's Palestine from which Israel was carved out after WWII, some say in another fulfilment of biblical prophecy and promise. The Canaanites were conquered and largely absorbed by the invading and marauding Jews. Do people want us to believe that some ran away by magically changing their complexion and turned up in Africa as black Africans?
This internal examination of the Bible leaves one wondering where we black Africans descended from? From whom in the Bible, if neither Cush nor Canaan? Dear reader, the truth is that we Africans are not the descendants of any of Noah's children, simply because the flood story is a myth! No God ever destroyed living things on the earth with a flood. I have already posted an article tracing the origins of the myth already [to the Gilgamesh Epic, for instance].
I intend to, if time permits, further deepen that with an examination of the two contradictory flood stories in Genesis mentioned in the article. But it may be necessary to trace the origin of the story of the family tree of man too later - anything from next week to many years from today. This is to show how the Jews simply took over what the ancient Egyptians (Kemetians) had formulated as the history of the world, with names like Kush (Cush) for the people of upper Egypt down to across the border with the Sudan, otherwise known as Nubia, long, long before it entered into Jewish mythology. The Jews simply stood history up-side down, placing themselves on top.
Some of us have been made aware that the Jews did not even have a word for "history" and borrowed the word "historia" from the Greeks. The Greeks, of course, got the Egyptian priest Manetho, (and certainly other priests of the areas they conquered in the Middle East, see The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 2:150-3), to write for them the history of the known world, (and much of the knowledge of the world to be attributed to the Greeks later, see Martin Bernal's Black Athena Vol. 1 and 2). These histories were put in the great library of Alexandria. And now, must we Africans accept the Jewish accounts based on these original sources, a distortion of what was written, as that of our own history? Accounts no longer accepted as totally true by practically all of the foremost scholars of Euro-America in their higher institutions of learning?
To what level of backwardness do some Africans want us to descend [and remain], simply because they are yet to or unable to shed the abject superstition of their pagan, unlettered, uneducated, semi-educated, christo-paganist or miseducated parents? (Choose the category which fits you). Of course, there are the educated ones with all sorts of higher degrees who are also caught in the snare [and actually leading the obscurantist crusade]. We must set ourselves free from the things used to enslave our minds.
Andy C. Y. Kwawukume Bergen, Norway, Sept. 1997 Now resident in London, UK 23 Nov. 2013 cyandyk@ymail.com
